1. Sheriff Woody

    Sheriff Woody Active Member

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    Formatting for KDP when Word is unavailable

    Discussion in 'Writing Software and Hardware' started by Sheriff Woody, Aug 27, 2014.

    Forgive me if this is the wrong forum, but I have a bit of an issue regarding formatting an ebook for self-publishing through KDP.

    I originally wrote the story in Apache OpenOffice with proper formatting, but that formatting will not carry over upon conversion through Calibre into .mobi and into Amazon's Kindle Previewer. Line spacing is off and paragraph indentations have all been removed, along with chapter breaks.

    As I do not have access to Word, the only way I know of fixing this is to load the story file into Word Online and reformat manually, which will be quite tedious and time-consuming work, then repeat the process of conversion of the .docx through Calibre (tested and this method does work).

    Is there a reason why the formatting did not carry over from OpenOffice? I can't think of a reason why it would not.

    Thanks in advance.
     
  2. Robert_S

    Robert_S Senior Member

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    Have you tried exporting it to a different format? RTF or DOC/DOCX?
     
  3. peachalulu

    peachalulu Member Reviewer Contributor

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    I had this problem too. I use WordPerfect so I had to download Open Office. Then I downloaded Sigil and Calibre but I eventually gave up on those two 'helpful' beauties as they were giving me more headaches than help.

    I went to Smashwords downloaded their guide and found that though it's written specifically for microsoft word, Openoffice is pretty similar and you can format accordingly. As long as you save in a word doc - Smashwords will do the conversions for you. Amazon ditto. Plus, both will let you look over your work and see how it looks.
     
  4. Sheriff Woody

    Sheriff Woody Active Member

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    Yes, I originally tried a .doc (97-2003) and then RTF. Neither seemed to work.


    Do you have a link to this guide?

    Also, what file format are you saving as in OpenOffice?
     
  5. cutecat22

    cutecat22 The Strange One Contributor

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    I think they also accept .pdf and .pub (I know books HAVE to be either of these for createspace) Can you not convert on line directly from Apache Open Office to .pdf or .pub so that you don't have to drag it into another word processor and re-format it all?
     
  6. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I'm befuddled about this, combined with the mention of a time-consuming process. I would have expected both line spacing and paragraph indentation to be formatting choices for the entire document, rather than a line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph issue. Would it be possible to just strip all formatting so that you're starting with a plain text document, to which you apply that document-level formatting?

    Edited to add: Well, you'd have to reapply formatting to title page and contents and chapter headers and such, too, but it still could be cleaner to start from naked text.
     
  7. peachalulu

    peachalulu Member Reviewer Contributor

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    Sheriff Woody likes this.
  8. Sheriff Woody

    Sheriff Woody Active Member

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    That could work, but as I'm still in the revising stage, I am simply doing it the long way and adding the paragraph indentations and line spacing adjustments manually as I rewrite.

    This way, I know the finished product will be clean and correct, and then I will play around with it without worry of causing further problems.

    Thanks. I'll give this a shot and see what happens.
     

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